Oh, and they had a new client. Law enforcement. Most of the police upper brass was old-school and couldn’t grasp the utility. But the new whiz kids who retrieved deleted files from the laptops of pedophiles—they all sent word up the chain: This is the future.
It started at the beginning of the methamphetamine explosion, back before honest citizens needed a U.S. passport and long-form birth certificate to buy over-the-counter sniffle remedies. At the encouragement of police, state lawmakers hired Wesley’s company and used the supporting data to show an undeniable statistical relationship between pockets of violent street crime and volumes of cold-medication sales, which led to pioneering legislation drying up the basic ingredients for drug labs.
That opened everyone’s eyes. Cold remedies? What about cold cases? Everyone remembered all the previously unsolved murders that had been cleared at the dawn of DNA. This looked like a silicon version of genetics, and another step forward in the march of technological justice.
The theory: We’ve got all these electronic files of credit-card purchases, utility bills, tollbooth hits, property taxes, airline tickets, car titles, etc., etc. Obviously too circumstantial to hold up in court, but what if we mashed all those records together, filtering for time and place. In the coldest of cases, it might at least narrow the field and generate a short list of those who deserved a closer look.
For instance: a rash of mystery rapes hit the Pensacola area in the late nineties. Then nothing for years. Police figured the assailant either moved, died, went to prison, or was shipped out with the military.
Then, in 2004, Pensacola authorities noticed a bulletin out of Jacksonville. Serial rapist. As they read, chills. Almost identical details: sliding-glass-door entry, panty-hose mask, one-sided serrated knife, even the exact verbatim instructions to each victim that they had withheld from the press: counting to one hundred, then back down again, before attempting to loosen the same kind of knots.
The Pensacola police got in touch with Jacksonville, and they decided to meet halfway. Literally. Tallahassee. They hovered over Wesley in his cubicle. First, he set the parameters for Pensacola during the six-month period of the first attacks, which pretty much created a list of everyone who had produced personal ID for anything, only about 1,850,000 people. Then he percolated that list through the last month’s info in Jacksonville—looking for those who had been in both places during the two time periods—which brought the number in the overlapping circle down to 2,379.
“Damn,” said the lead investigator. “I though we might have had something.”
“We do,” said Wesley. “That’s a workable number.”
“Workable?” said the detective. “It’s over two thousand.”
“That’s nothing the null sets can’t neutralize.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“The null sets are the silver-bullet statistics.” Wesley typed even faster as he spoke. “You say the attacks stopped in Pensacola in ’98 and resumed in Jacksonville in ’04? So what we do is take our list of two-thousand-some-odd suspects, flip the filter, then kick out all the names who had any hits in either city during the intervening six-year quiet time when the assailant was supposedly in jail or whatever . . .” He stopped typing for a dramatic pause, then pressed a final button.
The investigators leaned toward the screen. The number 2,379 quickly spun south. A thousand, 500, 80, 15, until it finally came to a stop: 1. And a suspect’s name. The last piece of data was a video-store rental no less. Chevy Chase vacation comedy. Detectives made some calls. Unbelievable. A seaman at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola had been shipped overseas, then six years later he was transferred back to another base in Jacksonville.
A dozen police vehicles were waved through the security gate and skidded up to the barracks. Military prosecutors arrived, and in less than five minutes the joint interrogation burped up a signed confession. The state of Florida wanted to take custody, and the navy said they were always happy to assist local law enforcement, but first they’d like to hold on to him for another hundred years.
FORT LAUDERDALE
Serge strolled the aisles of the home-improvement store, sucking coffee from a tube under his shirt.
“What are we looking for?” asked Coleman, slurping from his own tube of vodka.
“I’ll know when I see it. Just keep your eyes open for gigantic iron corkscrews.”
“What are those?”
“They’re hurricane tie-downs you twist into the ground and secure stuff when you don’t want to retrieve your aluminum shed from someone’s living room on the next block. That’s always an awkward visit.”
An employee in a yellow store vest came around the corner and smiled as he had been trained. Then the smile stopped. “Are you guys okay?”
“Great!” said Serge. Slurp, slurp.
“What’s with the tubes?”
“We have medical conditions,” said Coleman.
Serge nodded earnestly. “We’re in self-help.”
The employee sniffed the air. “Do I smell liquor?”
“A lot of things smell like liquor,” said Serge.
“Yeah,” said Coleman. “Like other liquor.”
Serge pulled up his shirt. “I’m clean. This is a clear plastic bladder that sports fans strap to their bellies with Velcro to sneak alcohol into arenas and stadiums. I learned it from Coleman, but I use it for coffee strictly due to my on-the-go needs.”
Coleman raised his own shirt. “This is water. You can’t test it because of my rights.” He lowered his shirt.
“We need your assistance,” said Serge. “Usually I can immediately lay my hands on anything in this place, like garage-door openers to activate bad stuff. You’re the expert: Do you think personal electronics can really bring down a 747?”
“What?”
“Of course you can’t speak on the record.” Serge slurped and rotated his head for answers. “Where are the hurricane tie-downs?”
“You trying to secure a shed?”
“Bigger!”
“A metal garage?”
“Needs to be bigger than that!”
“What on earth are you tying down?”
“That’s classified.” Serge briefly flashed a Miami Vice souvenir badge. “Give me the big mothers. Plus a short metal plumbing pipe like you’d use to rough in a showerhead, and your strongest plastic fasteners for electrical cables. Jigsaw, baseboard, paint, thumbtacks, balsa wood.” Slurp, slurp. “And can you escort us through checkout? Had some recent problems there. Our pictures might be on some flyers.”
Moments later, several employees whispered as Serge and Coleman walked out the door with plastic bags in their hands and four enormous iron corkscrews perched over their shoulders.
MIAMI BEACH
Neon glowed in an artistic rainbow from the landmark Art Deco hotels along internationally famous Ocean Drive. Red, pink, green, blue, orange, yellow, as if the owners had held a meeting.
Farther north on Collins Avenue were the larger, old-guard flagship resorts. The Delano, the Eden Roc, Fontainebleau, Deauville. At a newer, lesser-known resort in the middle, the clientele finally calmed down around three A.M. Some asleep, some passed out, some sitting up in bed with the TV remote, determined to squeeze out more vacation value.
By four A.M., most of the lights had gone dark up and down the hotel’s thirty-story facade.